Defendant at ‘bottom of the rung’, Anglo trial jury hears

The Companies Act places heavy duties on officers of a company, people who are "at the top", but Aoife Maguire, one of three former Anglo Irish Bank officials on trial, was "a person at the bottom of the rung", a jury has been told.

Patrick Gageby SC, for Ms Maguire, told Dublin Circuit Criminal Court the prosecution case, at its best, could indicate that if his client was an officer of the company, she might have committed an offence.

But she was an assistant manager and not “next, nigh or near” being an officer. He said this meant the prosecution could only bring a case of conspiracy to commit an offence against her.

“You can do that with conspiracy; you can expand it to do anything and everything,” Mr Gageby said.

He said this was done because it was convenient for the prosecution and it was a way of getting her for something she couldn’t be indicted for.

Ms Maguire (63) of Rothe Abbey, South Circular Road, Kilmainham, Dublin, Bernard Daly (67) of Collins Avenue West, Whitehall, Dublin and Tiarnan O'Mahoney (56) of Glen Pines, Enniskerry, Co Wicklow have been charged with conspiring to try to hide accounts, connected to the former chairman of the bank, Seán FitzPatrick, from Revenue between March 2003 and December 2004.

They have pleaded not guilty.

Mr Gageby said there was an element of “smooth talking” on the part of the prosecution. They have said Ms Maguire was a messenger to people in IT, that she asked Shay McGill, one of the IT staff, to delete an audit trail of an account connected to Mr FitzPatrick and she in some way altered the name and address aspect of a record. If that was the case and the records had been falsified, then the offence of falsifying had been committed. But because Ms Maguire was not an officer, the prosecution decided to deploy conspiracy.

He said the prosecution claimed Ms Maguire got the idea to delete accounts from her experiences of accounts which had been closed for seven years being deleted in the Isle of Man.

He asked the jury if they believed she had “raced up the stairs” while Mr FitzPatrick was in his office “putting with his putter or something”, and said “Seanie, I have it”, and Mr FitzPatrick had said he’d never thought of that.

He asked if there was any suggestion Ms Maguire was the prime mover or main engine or driving force behind the scheme. If that was the case, for whose benefit did she do it, he asked.

“It was definitely in the interests of somebody upstairs,” he said.

Mr Gageby said Ms Maguire’s co-accused, Mr O’Mahoney and Mr Daly were directors of the bank with long and prosperous careers, and Mr FitzPatrick was chief executive. He asked the jury to look at their relative positions. Ms Maguire was on the lower rungs and nobody reported to her. She was “basically a form of gofer”.

He said staff in IT were four or five rungs above her and it wasn't a question of her instructing them to delete accounts. She hadn't "blossomed into a dictator". She may have been passing on a message or doing what she was bidden, just as others such as head of compliance Brian Gillespie had done.

Mr FitzPatrick was the captain of the ship, but the assistant manager was in the documents, Mr Gageby said.

“She is the person you might say, with her fingerprints on it ... no-one upstairs is leaving fingerprints,” he said. Mr FitzPatrick was at the centre of it, but “with one bound he is free, leaving Ms Maguire to answer for it”.

He asked if the stoker below ship was responsible for the Titanic, and compared the case to the sinking of the Concordia, in which the captain made “an early dart for the lifeboat” leaving the women and children behind. Ms Maguire, “a minion, a small person” had been left to answer for all, he said.

Mr Gageby said all the people at the top spoke in riddles, and “nods and winks”, so that no one could pin them down and say they had been asked to do something. This was a sign of “native cunning”, he said, and it was Ms Maguire who was in the emails.

He said the Companies Act and the Oireachtas did not place those serious offences on smaller people, yet he didn't see Mr FitzPatrick coming in the door now to say it was all done on his watch.

“I think that’s a poor show,” Mr Gageby said.

Judge Patrick McCartan told the jury he would address them on Tuesday morning and they should be going out to consider their verdict by lunchtime.